Book review: Donoghue's engaging characters surprised by kinship in Akin

Book review: Donoghue's engaging characters surprised by kinship in Akin

London writer Emma Donoghue's story-telling skills are in fine form in her new, quick-paced novel, Akin. Donoghue fans won't be disappointed as the author of 2010's best-selling chronicle, Room, pens another page-turner.

London writer Emma Donoghue’s story-telling skills are in fine form in her new, quick-paced novel, Akin. Donoghue fans won’t be disappointed as the author of 2010’s best-selling chronicle, Room, pens another page-turner.

In Akin, kinship itself, in all its intriguing possibilities, is viewed through the forced pairing of an eighty-year-old widower and his 11-year-old grand-nephew and through the fraught events of a week long trip to the south of France.

When the book opens, in New York City, a frantic social worker is checking “kinship resources” for adolescent Michael Young, a boy bereft of any committed caregiver. The child’s father, a handsome wastrel whose irresponsible behaviour has sparked family friction, is dead of a drug overdose. Michael’s mother has almost three years yet to serve on a drug trafficking offence largely the fault of the boy’s father. As a result, Michael had been living with his maternal grandmother, who has just died.

Akin by Emma Donoghue (HarperCollins, $33)

The novel’s central character is Noah Selvaggio, a retired university professor, who is about to fly to Nice, the city of his birth and early childhood, to mark his 80th birthday and to try to ferret out the mysterious circumstances of his mother’s two year sojourn in German-occupied Nice during the Second World War.

His plans have been made, his bags are packed and his trip, timed to coincide with the French carnival season, cannot be delayed. Noah has never met his young nephew and is appalled when the social worker, desperate to make find a placement, suggests the boy, grandson of Noah’s late sister, accompany the professor on his visit to France. Although reluctant and feeling out of his depth, Noah agrees to take charge of the child. Two days remain and a scramble ensues for a passport for the boy.

Not surprisingly, the stage is set for a whirlwind, chaos-crammed visit to a city in the midst of celebration, a city dimly recollected by the elderly professor and rudely scorned by the petulant, hard-to-please boy. It places the jet-lagged pair in situations both poignant and hilarious as Noah and his nephew remain at odds with where and with whom they find themselves. And always in Noah’s mind is the sardonic voice of his late wife, Joan, who provides a more measured perspective on Noah’s bout with parenthood.

Although Donoghue’s lively tale has many attractions, its most appealing is the repartee between uncle and nephew, crisp, peevish exchanges which underscore the gulfs which exist between generations, gulfs which cannot be bridged easily. Michael is technologically savvy, while Noah is a novice. Noah constantly corrects Michael’s grammar, but the boy, who addresses his uncle as “dude,” refuses to rise to the bait.

Noah savours French food (mussels, terrine de fois gras, salade Nicoise), menu choices scoffed at by Michael, who insists on burgers, fries and pizza, not that French variations on these favourites meet with his approval.

While Noah may insist he can only carry on a conversation with the boy by resorting to the vulgar or the macabre, the resulting banter moves the action along with Donoghue’s trademark aplomb. Still, Noah is hard pressed. After another day of sparring, he decides he cannot handle another argument. “It was the repetition that appalled him: the stop-and-start, petty Whac-a-Mole wrangling that died down and flared up over and over.”

Donoghue is good, too, with atmosphere. She captures, with well chosen detail, the present day commercial aura of Nice with its array of international restaurants, casinos, ornate architecture and topless sunbathers: “A city full of shiny goods, families laughing on patios at ten o’clock at night. Nothing boarded up or burned out, rusting or crunching underfoot, no screeches of sirens.” The ambiguity surrounding the city’s checkered history during the Second World War ties in with Noah’s search into his mother’s murky past, a probe which might be aided by Michael’s computer expertise.

Donoghue’s sparkling story is both inventive and thought-provoking. Its two engaging characters, whom events have placed in too-close proximity and whose brush with kinship has startled both, remain with the reader when the book is finished. Familial connection, even when held at arm’s length, may not be as remote as assumed, and first steps, although tentative, seem possible. As a rumination on kinship and on its capacity to change outcomes, the book is convincing. Donoghue’s brisk, entertaining narrative voice comes through in the novel in spades, as uncle and nephew find their way to unexpected accommodation.

Akin takes its place alongside such stellar Donoghue fiction as Room, shortlisted for the Booker, Giller and Orange Prizes and of such well-received historical sagas as Slammerkin and The Sealed Letter. Her work also includes novels Frog Music and The Wonder, the short story collection Touchy Subjects and two stories for young readers, The Lotterys Plus One and The Lottereys More Or Less.